Gorsh! We All Have Accents

(upbeat music) - Hi. - Welcome to the Book of Fives podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. - I'm Megan Figueroa. - And I'm Carrie Gillan. - Carrie, I almost said I'm Carrie Gillan. - I was like so in my head. - I don't know why I was so in my head right now. (laughs) - Okay, that is very weird. - Oh yeah. (laughs) - That is very weird. (laughs) - Ooh. - You know what? There's just some, I don't know. It's been a weird-- - It's been a bad week for everyone in Arizona. - Oh yeah, that is true. - My head has all over the place. - Yeah. - Yeah, and I remember, was it a year? No, I guess it's closer to two years ago, right? - When we heard that Roby Wade was going to be overturned. - Right, and then we were on with Sarah Marshall. - Mm-hmm, yeah. - Yeah. - So here is one of the results of that. - Yeah, the Arizona almost complete total ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest. It's horrifying. Or like, I don't know if you're going to be, it's just gonna kill you. - Or yeah, right. - Well, it says it's, if it's gonna kill the mother, then that's an exception. But I just wonder about that part, too. - Yeah, it rarely works out in your favor. - Yeah, exactly. - Because, but you have to wait so long before you're allowed to do it. - Right, exactly, exactly. - So. - Yeah, so fun times, fun fun times. - Yeah. - Abortion is still very, very legal up here, so. - That's good. - And you can pay for it out of pocket, you know, if people need to travel to Canada. It's going to have to happen, I think. - Or Mexico. - Yeah, Mexico, too. Or sometimes you can just go to a different state, but, you know, I'm just saying, healthcare is relatively inexpensive here, even without insurance. So, just putting it out there. I think it's probably cheaper in Mexico, so if you're closer to Mexico, go there, but. - Yeah, absolutely. I know. - If you have the means, obviously, but, you know. - Right, I don't know. - I know there are abortion funds out there that can help with travel. - Yeah, there are, yeah. - Yeah. - So, I hope no one listening has to deal with this, but if you do, we support you. - Yeah, we support you. - So, I saw this on Threads. - Oh, okay. - This article is from January, but I had not heard anything about this, so I feel like, no, probably very few people will have not heard. - Yeah. - A new language spoken by just 350 people has evolved in Australia's outback. - Okay, I've not heard this. - No, no. - Yeah, okay. - A new language. - Yeah. - A newly documented or like they've created it. People have created it, but like, you know, in the natural way that-- - In the natural way, okay. Not like a conling. - No, it's what we would call a mixed language. - Okay. - So, in Canada and parts of the US, there's a language called Mitchiff, which is a mixed language that's probably the most famous, at least in North America. It's, yeah, anyway. This is another example of that. - Okay. - But in Australia. And it's spoken in the Northern Territory of Australia in a very remote village. And most people who live there are Walbury. So, it's called Light Walbury. - Light Walbury. - Okay. - We're very cool. - We're very cool. So, it has elements of standard Australian English and Walbury and also Creole. - Okay. - Which is an English-based Creole. So, yeah, it's kind of interesting. I guess that it was first reported by a bilingualist, Carmel O'Shanasi in 2005. And again, never heard of it. - Oh, right, no. 2005, okay, that's almost 20 years ago at this point. - Uh-huh, yeah. - And she thinks that it surfaced in the '70s and '80s when some of the Walbury all started using occasional English or Creole words. Okay, so like code switching. - Very cool. - It is really cool. - Yeah, it is really cool. Light Walbury. - Mm-hmm. - And you said it was about 350 speakers. So, first of all, this village is very remote. So, like the closest other community is 110 kilometers or 68 miles away. But the nearest town that has any significant size at all is 560 kilometers or 350 miles away. And that takes six hours to drive. - So, wow, we're talking remote, remote, remote. - Okay, yeah. - Because it takes that long to drive because it's mostly dirt roads. - Yeah, okay. So, very, very like four-wheel drive kind of dirt roads. Am I imagining? - Yeah, I think so. Because if they say it's like quote unquote unsealed, I don't know what that means. - Yeah. - I just thought that meant like not didn't have tar on it. But I'm like, well, that's covered by being dirt. But maybe like there's some kind of ceiling you can do on dirt roads to make them more stable. I really honestly don't know. This is way outside of my area of expertise. Okay, so yeah. So, this is the thing that I found really interesting. So, going back to midshif. Midshif is like really broad strokes than the nouns are mostly French and the verbs are mostly Cree or a Gipway. So, it's kind of a similar thing is going on here. So, most of the verbs and the verbal morphology come from English or Creole. And then the noun morphology comes from Wallery. So, you get this mixed system. That's why it's called a mixed language. That has very cool. - Yeah, really cool. - Midshif is something you've worked on, right? - Yes, yes, I have. That's very cool. - Yeah. - So, you're seeing the similarities here. - Seeing similarities, like kind of the opposite, right? Like the nouns are coming from the indigenous language. Whereas with Midshif, the nouns are coming from like the European language, right? But anyway, really cool. I love it. And there's even like, there's a clip where you can hear a young girl telling a story in this language. So, I will post the article and so you can take a listen if you're interested. - Yeah, that is very, very neat. That's like a good story to hear about like a new language. Instead of one that's becoming more and more endangered. - Mm-hmm. - Yes, I mean, there's only 350 speakers, but still. - Yeah, I mean, the pure number itself is not what tells you if it's endangered or not, but it's more, are you losing speakers or are you gaining speakers or are you stable? And this seems to be stable at least. - Stable, yeah, just good news. - Yeah. And again, it's because they're so isolated. The impact of English is obviously there because it helped create this new language in the first place, but it's not forcing them to switch completely to English. - Right, which is very good. - That's cool. - Awesome, that is very cool. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for sharing some good news. - Yeah, yeah, it's kind of something fun and interesting and yeah, not about discrimination exactly, but yeah, that's okay. Sometimes we just need to celebrate the language in general, yeah, and language diversity. Mm-hmm, yeah. So, I, we have two people to think, and the one person I completely forgot, like, this is from January. So we would like to thank Urban Tang. - Thank you. - And Reggie McNamara. - Yeah, thank you so much. We really, really appreciate anyone that can support us on Patreon. - Yes, yes, because it helps us keep the lights on. It helps us pay for the transcription and the editing, basically. Those are the two main things. So, thank you so much for anyone who is willing to slip us a few Bob. (laughing) And you can support us at www.patreon.com/vocalfriespod. And we have bonus episodes and we have stickers and there's a mug. - I was forgetting about that. - There's a mug, yeah, it's a cool one. - It is. - Yeah. And today we're, we have a really good episode. - Yeah, thank you all to find it really interesting. Lots, we cover a lot of ground. (laughing) (upbeat music) - All right, so we're so excited today to have three guests with us. We have first Rusty Barrett, who's Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky. His research is in Mayan Linguistics, Linguistics Anthropology and Social Linguistics. And we have Jennifer Kramer, who's Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky. Her research is in Perceptual Dialectology with a specific focus on Dialect Variation in Kentucky. And then finally we have Kevin B. McGown, who is a Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky and Director of the University of Kentucky Fanatics Lab. He is a politician and his research primarily focuses on speech perception and the ways in which the creation and perception of social identities influence our ability to understand each other. They are here to talk about their book English with an accent, language, ideology and discrimination in the United States, which is now in its third edition. Thank you so much for being here. - Yeah, thank you. - Thank you. We're happy to be here. - You know, I feel like your book is like the reason why I carry and I can have a podcast kind of. Like you were, you were the original-- - Oh geez. - Yeah, talking about linguistic discrimination. Way back in 1997 when the book was first published. So why did you want to write this book back then? And why did you want to update it? And has the need for it changed in the intervening years? - Yeah, we didn't write the original version. The 1997 and 2012, the first and second editions are by Rosina the big great. - My contribution in 1996 was being in Rosina's class when she was taking-- - Oh yeah, that's awesome. - Yeah, okay. So now I was wondering why you were talking about Rosina the big green in the office? And I guess I just did not understand. But yes, that book is, whenever anyone asks me like, what would you recommend people reading? It's always that one. - I think the 2012 edition is what I have. - If you read in that prep is what it actually talks a little bit about is how all three of us were greatly impacted by those earlier editions and the work that we do. So to be able to take on the third edition was one of these really exciting moments for the three of us because that book was so influential in the work that all of us do. As Kevin mentioned, he was in class. Rusty worked with Rosina at times when she was working on the book, I believe. And part of my dissertation came out of the idea of Southern discrimination, linguistic discrimination in the South. - Are you from the South? - Hi, I'm from Kentucky originally. - Oh, you are. So you guys actually get to be where you're from. - Yeah, we won the lottery. We don't play the lottery anymore because you don't get to go back home as an academic. - Yeah. (laughing) - That's usually true, yes. So what are language ideologies in general and standard language ideology in particular? - So language ideologies are sets of beliefs about language. So any sort of attitude about a particular way of speaking. So if you say people who say ain't are uneducated or something like that, that's a language ideology. And we have lots of them, but the most prevalent one in the US is standard language ideology, which argues that there's a structural basis for one dialect to be better than all others, which on the linguistic evidence would say exactly the opposite. There's nothing about the structure of a variety that makes it better, right? All languages are equal in terms of their ability to do what language does. So standard language ideologies says that anyone who doesn't speak in this certain way is somehow deficient, but there is no real standard that everyone agrees on in the first place. So it's all just sort of created through language. - Absolutely. And how do language ideologies contribute to social and equity? - Well, part of what we talk about in the book in various ways are the ways in which, essentially if I think something about you because of the way you talk, I am likely to do all sorts of things that go down the discrimination path, right? I've heard your voice, and now I'm not going to wrench you the supportment, or I've heard your voice, and now I'm not going to give you this job. And the standard language ideology, which sort of states that you're deficient because you didn't speak in the way I was expecting you is the justification, and that's not really a good way of approaching interacting with other people. - Yeah, and when people don't speak the way that we expect them to, that reminds me immediately of using the word articulate. When we're talking about black folks, if you use articulate this kind of this implication that you didn't expect them to sound that way. - Yeah, I mean, the beliefs we have about each other, a limit, they sent the boundaries up or and lower on what will you allow other people to be, right? So if I think someone's going to be hard to understand, then they're going to be harder to understand, or if I think somebody's going to be inarticulate as you point out, that was the big thing with President Obama, right? Is everybody was trotting out the word articulate in. Not intentionally sort of accidentally revealing these frankly racist language attitudes that they were walking around with. - And we see it show up in other places too, so I mentioned work on Southern discrimination. I always tell my students that if someone says, oh, you're the smartest Southerner I've ever met, it's not that's not a compliment. They're not expecting you to say anything worthwhile. - Absolutely, wow. You brought in this new addition, you brought up an example that I love, that's really, I thought I'd have it with President Obama is with Julian Castro, and when he was in the debate and he was speaking Spanish and how when Bethel O'Rourke and I think Cory Booker spoke Spanish, they were praised for it, but when Julian, he used the wrong four, he was poor and said, "Bada, I think," or the other way around, he was admonished for it. And I really liked that you bring that example into the book. - Yeah, so that's part of standard language ideology is this idea that people who grow up speaking English and some other language or somehow, just deficient because they don't speak just English. And then people who grow up monolingual and learn a second language are praised as doing something amazing when they're both really doing the same thing, right? - There's like a meme that says, what's classy if you're rich and trashy if you're poor, and one of them is speak two languages. - Yes, exactly. - Yeah, absolutely. - I haven't seen that, but that's perfect. - Oh, really? - No, I haven't. - Yeah, oh, interesting. Have language ideologies changed at all since 1997? - Or are we all stuck in the same milieu? - I mean, I normally, I would say rusty should go first, but maybe he and Jennifer can back clean up. So what I would say is language ideologies have changed importantly in two ways since Rosina's first edition and second edition of the book, which is, first I'll talk about on the linguistic side, right? So she was breaking, she was sort of creating this area that the rest of us get to play in, and she was doing this foundational work on language ideology and how there's a big thread in that first book about how kind of language ideologies are some of the last publicly acceptable barriers or publicly acceptable ways to discriminate against people. In a negative way, I feel like that has sort of slid. I think there are more ways that it's socially acceptable. - Yeah. - But on the linguistic side of fascinating things happen, I think where that book reifies social identities, right? And says there are hicks and hillbillies. What do those people talk like? There are black people, what do those people talk like? There are men and women, what do those people talk like? And what we had to do in this edition of the book was sort of carefully try to preserve the part we love about the book, the part that made our research possible. And then say, but let's back off from that and let's say there are all of this, all of this identity is created through linguistic behavior and the perception of the creation of identity through linguistic behavior. So not what do we say instead? And it's, well, there are ways of talking that can project an identity, right? And the identity you are personally able to project is both performed through linguistic behavior, but also then limited by the ideologies of the person listening to you. And it was a much larger project that I think than any of the three of us thought we were taking on. But I'm really happy with, at least with what Jennifer and Rusty did. - Well, it's gonna say like, I mean, you added so much that it felt like a different book. I hope that that's a compliment. I mean for it to be a compliment. I have the 2012 edition and you've added so much and these new examples are so, it's so nice to have, like they said, with the Julien Castro one. It's just like so nice to read these new ones. I love how you use Latinx. Like just these little things that you've added in there really add to the 1997, 2012 editions very much so. - Oh, and we wanted to keep the stuff that makes the book beloved. And so for example, the Disney chapter is always, everyone wants to tell me about the Disney chapter. And I love that chapter. But one of the things we had to do was update it for more recent movies and ways of thinking about Disney. We've, you know, even Disney has ventured into the sort of live action thing and so we could do this wonderful comparison of those ideologies on Beauty and the Beast, for example, and the animated versus the live action version. And so keeping that chapter there, but building it out and pulling in these other aspects of the media and their impact on people's ideologies, I thought was a really important thing for us to do. - And you added a chapter on sign language and deaf community, why did you want to do that? - Yeah, so I think adding the chapter was Rusty's idea or Rusty and Jennifer's idea, but the implementation of it fell to me. There's this whole linguistic world that is sort of ignored or missing, right? And that more people need to pay attention to. And back, we hosted the 2017 Institute here at Kentucky. And I got to know a student from Gallaudet who was taking my eye tracking class when that happened and he was in a video that Gallaudet made about, what do we, the deaf community, want hearing people to know about sign language? And that chapter is very much the result of sort of sitting down with that video and talking to him and thinking, all right, well, this book, you know, a lot of people might read this book, a lot of hearing people might read this book. So how could I maybe extend the reach of this video a little bit, put it in print and tell people, you know, tell linguists, look here's this interesting area that's under-researched and tell students who are sitting in the classes reading this book for the first time, you know, not only do language ideologies touch hearing people, but these language ideologies sort of create limitations on deaf people that are unnatural limitations, right? - Well, not only is it understudied, but it's erased by many linguists. We just don't even talk about it. - Yeah, I mean, parts of speech, there's no reason to call them parts of speech. - That's a good point, that is a good point. - Because they have, they have quote unquote parts of speech in. - Yeah, so there's much better to call them something like lexical categories or to at least theorize about the label for that kind of thing. - No, we had to, one of my graduate phonology classes for a person who studied sign language phonology, the phone in phonology, right? - Oh, yeah, yeah. - You have other examples of how things are misunderstood about language and how language works and how that contributes to linguistic discrimination. Here's one of the ones that as a phonetician, I work on every time I teach a new student about phonetics, right? So we'll be Americans, at least, walk around with this ideology that saying run-in is lazier than saying running, right? And so when we reach that part where we're talking about segments and intro phonetics class, I always, always try to make the point that there isn't any measurable sort of muscular action or a measurable amount of work difference between saying running and running. And crucially, we can tell people, you know, speech isn't letters, it's speech sounds. And so it's not dropping the G, it's pronouncing a Viler nasal, not an Alviler nasal. But then we can add to that from an articulatory perspective, we can add to that. And it's not actually less work, right? There's, you're not, you're not burning fewer calories, saying run-in. And so the idea that it's lazier exists entirely in the mind of the listener, right? Well, also in the mind of the talker, but the idea that it's lazier is entirely a socially constructed thing. So even in the middle of sort of an artitulatory phonetics class, there's this opportunity to say, sociolinguistics always matters. And here's one way that we can think about, not only the segmental identity of tongue gesture, but also the sort of social identity implications of a tongue gesture. All three of us have taught a class that's basically language and discrimination. And we always used this book for the class. And one of those struggles I have, and a lot of our students tend to be white, middle class, often Kentucky or the region around us. And I often worried that some of the examples in the book, I mean, they need to hear them, they need to see them, but they wouldn't be familiar to them. So I was particularly wanting to emphasize what happens to southerners in their situations of linguistic discrimination and to show them that these are real, they're real world outcomes. And so at least one of the stories from my students ended up in the book, I think that I had a student who told me that she came to Kentucky and that means she took out student loans. But she obviously did in a softball player. And I think this one ended up in the book. She went to one of these athletics, try out things and one of the coaches took her side and said, you're really good player. And I'd have you on my team if you didn't sound like such a rube. And what does that have to do with softball? Right, so what it had to do for the student was, she didn't get a scholarship to go to whatever school this was. And I don't know the school. But presumably she would have had maybe lower loans if not no loans, depending on what kind of scholarship that would have been, all because one person decided they didn't like how they sounded. And they're right, what does that have to do with softball? It doesn't have anything to do with softball. Plenty of people play plenty of sports and sell them to plenty of different ways. But that was a real financial impact on that person. And I tried to bring those real world impacts to light when we talk about it, because it's one thing to say, I hear you speaking this way. And I think you're from such and such a place. But it's another whole thing then to say, and therefore I don't think you're worthy of whatever the scholarship. So that fine line between knowing someone's from a place and then discriminating against them because of it or knowing someone has a certain ethnic, racial, sexual, whatever, background. - What about you, Rusty? - For me, the thing that is sort of the biggest misunderstanding and the thing that sort of upsets me that people don't understand about language is the way that anything that is in standard English gets treated as somehow less complicated and unable to express things and not having any new wants and so on. I'm from Arkansas and my dialect has lots of things like there's a distinction between y'alls and y'allses. So y'alls is a collective plural. So it's something owned by all of you together but y'allses would be distributed across individuals. And that's something that standard English doesn't do, right? And so when people hear she work and or she be working, they don't realize that those are making a difference in meaning, they're just both wrong to most people. And it's not that they're wrong, there's a complicated system going on there. - Yeah, absolutely. We don't have a way of like easily talking about y'alls and y'allses, I'd have to explain that in my dialect in a different way, that way that would take it much longer to explain than saying y'alls or y'allses. - Yeah. - So you say in the book something that I wanted to ask about, what do you mean, and I think it's really good to just remind our listeners of this. What do you mean when you say that linguistic stereotypes are founded in social prejudices rather than linguistic structure? - So part of that is that there's nothing inherent to the structure that means something is less than. An example we often give, I don't remember this one, ended up in the book, is that, for example, in English, standard English says don't put two negatives in the sentence, so I don't have any sugar. As opposed to I don't have no sugar. So the two negative parts is bad, right? In that grammar, I'm not supposed to do that. But we know that tons of the non-standard varieties that exist do this. If you flip it and you look at something like French or several other romance languages, there's this requirement in the negatives to have two parts. So j'en sais pas, is French for I don't know, and you have to have the and the pa in formal standard French to have a negative. So you were supposed to have a double negative. And sure enough, regular colloquial French, they say, j'ai pas, so they lose the, which is the actual negative. But colloquially, they drop one. So single negative is, quote unquote, wrong. There, and there's no reason. Structurally, they just exist. Grammar just is, nothing is bad, nothing is good. It just is. And so when someone says, oh, because they use that structure, I think they are lazy, bad, ugly, whatever the bad things are. It's got to be about the people as the language itself, it just is. The language itself just is, yeah, I love it. No, it's perfect. I think it's just really good to remind our listeners about that because I don't know, I mean, that's kind of at the heart of tackling linguistic discrimination, I think, is to make sure that people know that there's nothing inherent to the language that is good or bad. Or, you know, it's about our perceptions of social categories and social relationships and all of that. Yeah, that's what we bring to it. My favorite example of that is word initial eights, which is obligatory in proper British English, right? And is grammatically incorrect in French, right? So the proper French and proper English in Britain have the same pattern. And we have a mix, right? And we used to have a British colleague who said, oh, I hate it when I hear Americans say herb. It's like they're trying to be uppity in all continental and French. And I had to remind him that we lived down the road from a town called Versailles in that, down to French, was not something that people cared about very much around. That's definitely not. Yeah, that one is one of my favorites because I think I say it either way depending and because I'm Canadian, I don't know, can strap between the two worlds. And I don't know which one. I used to say at first. So-- It's the problem of paying attention to languages. You can no longer know what you actually do because you know all real things. [LAUGHTER] It's so true. That is part of the problem, yes. And plus I lived in the United States for a long time. So that kind of changed a bunch of things, too. Is it pasta or pasta? Oh, my God, it's pasta. It's pasta. I'm a pasta, but taco and macho. But in the UK, it's macho. In Nacho, right? They would say nacho for nacho? That's probably depends. Like it's always remind our listeners that we're human here. I was about to say that that's horrifying. We still have our reactions to things. We just have to be sure that we keep them to ourselves and not act on them. I tell students that when they take classes with me that I've given them their imaginary linguist hat and they're supposed to wear it in class, but that when they take their linguist hat off, I recognize this stuff. It's out there and it happens even to linguists. We take our hats off and we have pet peeves, too. Yeah, they're very deeply embedded. So it's really hard to rip them fully out. It's just important that we recognize them, right? And they're part of the enterprise sometimes, right? So we'll do this thing where we say, prescriptiveism is bad. You've got to be descriptive and all language is good. And then you get to the syntax part of the chapter and you go, now let's talk about English. Here's what English does. Let's talk about Spanish. Well, here's what Spanish does. And it's like, well, which Spanish do you mean exactly? Which English do you mean exactly? There's a deep prescriptiveism baked into that that is just, I would love everybody to at least acknowledge it. When I was in graduate school, you had to write the stars on the sentences and then figure out which ones were grammatical and not grammatical and explain it according to the theory from class. And my stars were exactly opposite of what was expected because of my dialect. And I ended up having to go with the students from Korea and Japan to get grammaticality judgments from another speaker of English so that I could pass syntax. Oh, that's not OK. That is not OK at all. Have you used your own data? I feel like, yeah, you should be allowed to. That's ridiculous. Well, it's not their own date. Were you given sentences to-- Yeah, but it's still your judgment, sure, yeah. But you have to judge them. Yeah. I got a bad grade on a syntax assignment. I'm not going to name any names. On a syntax assignment in a graduate school, because my parents are both from Dublin, Ireland. And I couldn't get the binding conditions on reflexive pronouns. I was just like, give them self a towel. That's completely fine to me. Yeah. Yeah, I had problems with that, too, because yeah, I don't have those. But I had something that was different from what was expected. I can't remember now. And my professor at the time said, OK, well, just use the judgments I'm giving you. I recognize that you have a different system. But just to simplify things, at least she was up front in that way, that I can understand. But just like, yeah, it's still problematic. We know, intellectually, we know there are the varieties, but we don't seem to know how to deal with it. Yeah, it's really hard. It's really hard. And I'm not trying to-- I'm not trying to-- I don't want anybody to punish me at the next cell at the same meeting. But I think that really grinds my gears as a phonetician. Can I use that expression? Is this assignments the early in the semester, usually in an integral class? But it happens in other classes too. But early in the semester, you'll get translate these words into the IPA. That's not a possible request, right? I mean, translate these words into the IPA. What can I possibly mark wrong? If I say translate these words into the IPA, and I don't know that the person doing the translation is from Burl, Western North Carolina. OK, sorry, I'll get off my cell phone. No, it's OK, it's so box away. I always had a hard time with the IPA, because I didn't know-- I would want to compare with my classmates or whatever, but I realized that we do have different ways of saying it. I didn't trust myself enough to trust my own way of saying things. And English is complicated. There's a lot of different Englishes. Speaking of Englishes, we've already talked a bit about this. But since you're all at the University of Kentucky, I want to talk more about the American South. Because we've talked about this before in the show. We've had a couple episodes. But I think it's really worth discussing again. What does it mean to sound southern? And why is this viewed as pejorative by so many Americans, even by those that are southern themselves? So can I take this one? I think you have to. Yes. I think I have to. So a lot of my work is on-- It's Kentucky Southern, actually. So I can ask you that first. You, too. Is it southern? I would have said yes before the way you're looking at me. I mean, I was surprised that Megan asked you if you were southern, because to me, you sound southern. So yes, yes, to me, it's southern. OK, so if I asked my Michigan colleague here, he would agree with you that it's absolutely the South. I don't actually know where Rusty lands on this now, but I guess some folks in Arkansas and definitely people in other parts of the South are like, no, Kentucky doesn't count. And so it's that this really interesting crossroads, socioe historically, politically, geographically, everything. And so Kentucky has this kind of split situation going on. I think of myself as southern, so I don't have a problem with sounding southern. But I know that a lot of people do. And you imagine that you perception ontology. And some of the stuff that ends up in the book, there's a whole chapter that's focused on perceptions. And my kind of perceptions, which are a little different than the kinds of perceptions kept in studies. But essentially, a lot of times, what we do is we will give people a map and we'll say, tell me where people have a certain way of talking. And they'll draw on that map. And that's, that's a lot of what perceptual psychology ends up being. And sure enough, when you ask anybody to draw one of these maps in the American anyway, they almost to a person will draw a South. So that's the first point is it's a known entity. It's a thing that everyone knows exists. Then the next thing to note is that by and large, when people do draw the South, if you also ask them to label it or rate it in any way, as we often do, it gets a lot of pretty disparaging comments. So these labels, like Kick, Hill, Billion, Redneck, which tend to be pretty pejorative. And worse, I've seen a lot worse. And then describing it. Really, I would call them Henri. I think that word is supposed to be pronounced ornery. That's supposed to be. It's supposed to. They write some pretty bad things. And they also rate them pretty low on lots of different categories. Nod southerners will say southerners are not pleasant. They're not correct. They're not educated. They're not pretty. They're not anything. And then the part you mentioned about southerners themselves, that kind of what we would often call linguistic insecurity, where they might rate it pretty nicely. Those are pretty pleasant, right? But they themselves won't rate their own varieties as correct. And it's the sort of standard stereotype of really, really sweet guy, but not the brightest cry on in the box. And so they basically own that. A lot of them do. And so where does that come from? Well, I think that idea that it's a known entity is really important for this. So whether you've been to the south or not, the south has been the butt of the joke for ages in the media in various places, right? And so it's only relatively recently we start seeing a little more pride and ownership in southerners as being something good again, but they're still not that same level of pride in the way that they talk. They've fully taken on the idea that they don't sound very good, which is why you end up with a lot of people saying, I need to work on my accent, work on the way that I talk. And so I'll always ask students. And I don't know if they're always on as I'm like, have you ever tried to change anything in a lot of them have? I remind them that if they get super emotional or drunk, it's likely to come back. But that idea that they need to change is pretty pervasive. I have to tell them that as much as I want to celebrate what they do, I'm not the one at the Fortune 500 company, they want to get a job at, and I recognize that they're walking on what we call in the book, this linguistic type rope. This idea that you want to belong, where are you belong? And so students at Kentucky will say they get to the UK and they get picked on for how they talk. So they fix it and then they go back home and then they get picked on by their parents because they sound like they got above their raisin. And that's that type of they're walking. So I think that southerners have that. And obviously they're not the only ones that have that particular phenomenon going on. But I think that's a big thing in the American context is the South being pitted against everyone else, but also southerners for a take in it. The media is your right, so to blame for this. I have not so late, but they're big. Well, I know. I'm thinking about myself where I have an aunt from Arkansas and sounds like she's from Arkansas, whatever that means. She doesn't sound like me. And I remember talking to her on the phone and just thinking that there was something wrong with her accent and not wrong with my accent. Because even though having a relative wasn't as strong as seeing the Beverly Hill billies or whatever on Nick at night or whatever, that was just so much more pervasive for me somehow. Yeah, I mean to think about a thing that shocks my students. Now that I'm here in Kentucky is pointing out to them that goofy is meant to be a Southern caricature, the Disney character goofy. - I did not know that. I didn't know that. - Wow. - It's so embedded that the actually the indexicality starts to disappear, right? And the southerners kind of disappears into the goofiness. Also, it's not a great, it's not a very accurate. - No, not even close. It's not even like, I don't know, you're 70 Sam or somebody for like, yeah, that's a better one. Like at least I can pinpoint that. Goofy, no. - No, but you said something that Goofy says that you told your students, finally all got it. Are you gonna try to get me to say, Garsh? - Garsh, people don't like somebody. - Oh, Garsh. - That is the only thing. - But what Jennifer was saying is a good example of what you brought up earlier in that discussion was that prejudice against language are about social stereotypes, right? So a southerner sort of is seen as ignorant and backward to end, but sort of harmless, right? And a lot of forms in African-American English and Southern English overlap, right? And so the same sentence will be interpreted as, oh, that person is like dangerous or frightening or what have you, but oh, or they're not, they're harmless. Although I guess there are people who are afraid of southerners, but they see deliverance. - Yeah. But it's clear that what's happening in terms of how to interpret the language is about previous stereotypes. - And that's why the media is part of the equation because it's a shortcut in storytelling. So the example, Nady Goofy doesn't do it for you, but Shirley Maider from Cars does. - My name is Maider. - Maider? - Yeah, like Tom Maider, but without the cup. - That he's-- - I've never seen cars, so-- - Ooh, you've got to see cars, it's the-- - Yeah, right. So just so you can see what they're talking about with Maider, but do you think? - So he is a lovable, not quite so smart sidekick character. And Disney is good at this. They do it over and over and over again. And the reason they do it is because I only have two hours or an hour and a half to get you to feel something about this character. So I need to lean on what you already have in your brain. And so it's a shortcut. And that's why you regularly see not just in Disney, but in other movies, the good guy has a standard sounding accent, doesn't sound like he's from anywhere. And the sidekicks and the lackeys and the butts of the jokes again, they'll have something else often. So then if you want the sweet but stupid, you'll get African-American English or Chicano English and the example in the Lion King with the Hyenas. - Well, well, Bons, I wonder if we got here. - I don't know, Shenzille. What do you think, Ed? (laughs) - Oh, look at the sun. It's time to go. - What's the hurry? - We love you to stick around, Tim. - Yeah, we could have whatever's lying around. (laughing) - You get the two of them alongside a blathering idiot that doesn't say anything, right? He just blathers and that they're all the same. So basically speaking and coherently is the same. That's how you know these are the bad guys, just the lackeys. And so it's a good shortcut to use good in the sense that it allows even small children who are already baking in this sort of milieu of stereotypes to go, "Oh, I get it, he's liking McQueen's best friend and he's not very smart, let's go." - One of the many, many ways that Rosina blew my mind when I was an undergrad at Michigan was this exact conversation about how, you know, sure, you use voice to create identity as a kind of shortcut in Disney movies and other media. But the little ones who are first being exposed to this, they learn the meaning in the other direction, right? So they learn like, "This is the bad guy, this is the villain, this is the dumb one." And then they come to associate it. So as she says in the first two editions of the book, it's the media is responsible for contributing to at least the creation of these stereotypes, not just the implication, not just the implementation of the stereotypes. - And the smart bad guys usually have a British accent. - Oh yeah, British is evil genius, that's a stereotype, right? - And they can do some of this, right? The cartoons are a particularly interesting one because how do you give a personality to an animat objects? Right, and you can do some of it through design. So, again, back to Mator, you wanna make him seem a little off, you make him kind of a clunky tow truck. Okay, and he's rusty, not rusty bear it, but he's rusty, right? And so you can do some of it with imagery, but also they're gonna have to say something, and that's where you can do a lot with the stereotypes that already exist in the community. - Well, and we kind of do this too, right? And we have shortcuts ourselves when, I mean, this is what's playing out when we're linguistically discriminating against people. - Absolutely. As humans, we like to categorize, and that's what we're doing with stereotypes, ultimately. - It's worth noting that the actor that voice is Mator is from Nebraska, and it's not Southern. And so you're totally getting a stereotype of Southernness and not an actual Southerner. - Yeah, and that's usually the case, right, with these instances, I find, is that they're not actually Southern. - Yeah, or not actually Indian, right? In the case of Oppo from the since instance. - Yes. 100%. - I teach a class on speech perception, sort of a third wave sociolinguistics introduction to speech perception through the medium of the muppets. And so everybody builds a puppet, and you have to create an identity for the puppet, and then create a voice, and then write it. It's a way of separating people from teaching about how identity works without all of the sort of personal threat of having it be about them, person themselves. But one of the things I've noticed teaching in this class that would never have jumped out to me before is how not lazy the muppet workshop people are in creating characters with specifically this use of linguistic stereotypes in character creations. Sometimes they lean on it, but you know, they'll use some New Jersey accent for a rat, for example, which is probably not ideal. - When yo, yo, yo, we are about to do our own skateboarding dog video, right here on the beach, without our own skateboarding dog, take it away raw. - That's true. - Well, a lot of the main muppet voices, they don't use it. It's really admirable, I think. Sorry. - And that's why you got the cookie monster shirt on right now. - You're also a cookie. - Yeah. - I'm not sure which way the causality goes there. - You should have him back on here just to talk about the muppets. - I am so old. - You let's do it 100%. - Are you a chaos muppet or an order muppet? - Oh, a chaos muppet. - Me too. (laughing) - So are there any last examples you wanna leave our listeners with anything that we didn't touch on? - Yeah, 'cause you go through so many. It's such a, you do such a good job of, again, adding to the original. - Thanks. - And yeah, it's fantastic. - Definitely. - Definitely recommend. - R, yes. - Yes, R. - That chapter. - I think-- - That was an addition, right? - Oh, yeah. - Or was it not? - That's a new addition. I mean, there's this amazing thing that happened with R in U of S English in the last century where social meaning of non-roticity flipped, right? So that in the earliest part of the 20th century, the prestigious dialect of American English was non-rotic. And so the chapter talks about kind of how you get into that situation. And then mid-century it flips and wrote it sort of a midwestern-ish-rotic target becomes the prestige dialect as you may be only here right now. And so the chapter is about that. And when I said that chapter before, what I mean is, that was an especially big endeavor, especially painful chapter, right? I hope it doesn't come through in the text, but-- - No, yeah. - Oh good. I mean, I was reading Middle English. I was reading ancient sort of philological books and modern linguistic anthropology. And for some reason, I put a big thing in there about articulation of different rodents. I don't know, I haven't read it again since we-- The last time we typed before it when public was published. - Well, since he won't be positive about himself, but I'll say one of the things that that chapter does is that it takes something that's easily recognizable to readers, right? Other than southern, ah, ourlessness is a thing people will tell you about. If they're familiar with New York accents or Boston accents or whatever, they're gonna be like, "Oh yeah, ourless," or, you know, they don't happen. They don't say their ours. That's how they'll say it. They're so lazy, they don't say their ours. But like to take this thing that is a little-- You can see this thing. You hear it as no r. Well, guess what? It's got this fascinating history of pronunciation. And it does exactly what we were saying earlier about. It can't be the structure. It can't be the structure, have an r or don't have an r. If it can flip like that in its meaning, it's this arbitraryness and language that they just aren't-- they aren't seeing because so much of what they hear out there is exactly the thing you mentioned. Oh, they're lazy because they won't articulate this r. No, it's way more than that. It's more a kind of fashion than anything else. And it's pretty clear that the flip-- I mean, there's a lot of factors that go into what causes the flip, but it's clear that racism in the Northern migration and antisemitism played major roles. I mean, these are documented influences that people were trying to get away from. I know that racism, maybe you should explain both, because I've never heard the antisemitic part, so I'm interested to hear about that. Yeah, so as I say, it's been a while since I've read the chapter, but one of the kind of arrests he probably has the dates to mind here, so please fill them in. But one of the sort of shocking things is that in the 19 late 20s, there's an address given by the president of Harvard saying, we're letting in too many New York Jews, and we need to improve Harvard by letting in more good Midwestern folk. And so there's an active decision, not just at Harvard, but among the IVs, to try to recruit wealthy Midwest and white Midwesterners into the student body. And that brings with it a re-valorization of what it means to be erotic or non-redic is occurring at the time. And part of that re-valorization is this no longer sounds metropolitan and educated. And now has these re-valorizations that are less desirable in mid-20th century America. And what I love most about this chapter and the reason that the thing that kept me going is the way that it re-contextualizes LeBov's famous department store study, right? And actually, there's this part in that chapter where I just insert lovingly, just insert all of the text from the second edition that's handling the LeBov's department store study. But it means differently now that R has, in the 1960s, right? In the mid-1960s, R has just 20 years of the issue before undergone this major change in what it means to be an erotic speaker and what it means to be a erotic speaker. And that's hard for us to see from the position of, for me, the first time I encountered it in the mid-90s US. But even now, at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, it's hard for us to see that this re-valorization had just happened. So social meaning is arbitrary, right? - Yes, of course. I should never surprise me that anti-Semitism is there somewhere because every conspiracy theory, somehow it's there, of course it's there, but I just had no idea about the Arles. I knew about the racism side. Oh my goodness. - If you think of New York sort of a big ol' with the Shmiya, right, the Arlesness is the stereotype. And I mean, when they decided to sort of shift trying to get people from Illinois in Ohio and Michigan to go to Harvard, part of that. That was when they also instated the SAT to sort of, ultimately, weed out Jewish students. So it was all part of this sort of shift in terms of how we sort of judge people and reward them, I guess. Yeah. - Yeah, of course, of course. - Oh my goodness, of course. - Yeah, but I mean, there's a burden there, right? Like if you're going to make a claim, that sounds like an outrageous claim to someone, to someone who isn't open to it, right? And so there's a burden there that I hope we meet in the chapter of showing students, this is what evidence looks like, this is how you bring evidence and support of a position and avoid circularity and these sorts of things. So that's all in there, too. - Well, thank you. This has been a really great conversation. - Yeah, and I'm very excited. - Yeah. And yes, we will definitely have muppets at some point. Yes, if I don't get it, that's gonna happen. But yeah, thank you so much for being here. - Yeah, thank you. - Thanks for having us. Again, I completely recommend this edition of the book. It is fantastic. And you will find so many things in there that we talk about on the podcast. - I'm gonna make a little shout out to your listeners. - Yes, yes. - Absolutely. - There's a thing that happens sometimes, we get kind of connected to our book. And especially if we're instructors and we're like, I've been teaching from this book, I've got a good rhythm. And as you said, it's almost like a new book. And so what, it would be a very hard shift for someone who's been teaching from the second edition for a long time to shift to teaching from the third edition. But I encourage you to check out the book and take a look and see, we have tried to keep that which made this book special to begin with and add new things that will be very relevant to students. It's very easy to make the case for why discrimination is happening and maybe shouldn't. And what we're hoping is that if we get a chance and we don't know yet, but if we get a chance to do the next edition, if that happens, that we'll be able to build on this foundation. We've already got, keep bringing in the new stories, new histories, new ways of thinking about how language discrimination works. And we just hope people will consider utilizing this book and maybe in addition to other editions, I don't know. But I know that it can be hard to make the shift. Now, just hope people will take a look at it. - Perfect. - Definitely worth it. - Yes. - And we leave our listeners with one final message. - Don't be an asshole. - That's what it does. (both laughing) - Thank you. - Thanks. (upbeat music) - The Vocal Fries Podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillan, The Music by Nick Granham. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at VocalFriesPod. You can email us at [email protected] and our website is VocalFriesPod.com. (upbeat music)